[gribbly]

>On the other side, one of the problems people have with GCC is that it's run by people who actively want to make worse software for political reasons.

Well, for an end user those 'political' reasons are often practical benefits.

Having features only available as proprietary add-ons or through proprietary forks, or being locked out of running the code of your choice on hardware you've bought, are things I find very unappealing.

Of course there are downsides with copyleft as well, because there is no perfect solution to this problem.

Personally I'm favoring permissive licensing for projects where there is little or no incentive for commercial proprietary forks, and copyleft for projects where there is (typically end user targeted).

[a_t48]

At my last company, clang let us do codegen for serialization (for a game like project). If clang had been copyleft we would have had to use a different solution - though we had intended/hoped on releasing our core libraries as open source, we weren't in a good place to do so.

[belorn]

As can be seen in the recent discussion on steam developer fees, some game developers are advocating that the initial cost of releasing games should be increased. It would reduce competition. Having a proprietary c++ compiler plug-in be a requirement would server a similar purpose, limiting competition to established developers and those few who are willing to pay the initial price.

[a_t48]

Hmm? I'm not sure how this is relevant - this wasn't a compiler plugin and is strictly not necessarily for 95% of developers out there- we just had extraordinary requirements that were best served by parsing our classes. Which developers are asking for higher initial prices? If they are asking for them, it's not to reduce competition - I don't know a single developer I've met who wants less games out there - it's because games are Fucking expensive to make nowadays. Consumers have higher standards of quality these days unless you go into a niche genre. (This is part of why 2d platformers are so common with indie developers - 2d is way cheaper to make than 3d)